Grandparent Health and Young Adults' Judgments of Their Grandparent-Grandchild Relationships

ABSTRACT

Using the Common-Sense Model of illness representations (Leventhal, Myer, & Nerenz, 1980) as a framework, we investigated impairment-related variables as predictors of young adults' experiences in relationships with ill/disabled grandparents. Undergraduates (N = 153) completed a questionnaire about their relationships with grandparents who lived with cognitive, physical, or psychological impairment(s). The extent to which participants worried about their grandparents' health/wellbeing and their perceptions of (a) the severity of their grandparents' impairments and (b) the degree to which these impairments affected areas of their own lives were predictors. Satisfaction with contact, investment in the relationship, and family strain resulting from the grandparents' impairment served as criterion variables. Results support the utility of examining grandparent health in research on grandparent-grandchild relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Grandparent-grandchild relationships
• health
• relationship experiences
• Common-Sense Model of illness representations

The research presented in this paper is based on the second author's undergraduate honors thesis and was supported in part by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A full discussion of the worries and impact data used here as predictor variables has been reported elsewhere (Boon & Shaw, 2007). The authors would like to thank Cheryl Plascko and Beth MacEachern for assistance with data collection and entry, Eman Safadi and Lauren Sukovieff for assistance with proofing, and Candace Konnert and Rebecca Malhi for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. In their meta-analysis, Hagger and Orbell equated measures of illness “seriousness” with the Common-Sense Model consequences dimension. Accordingly, we treat our perceived severity measure (see Method) as an index of grandchildren's views of the consequences of their grandparents' impairment(s).

2. We conducted regressions in which the consequences variables served as criterion variables and satisfaction with contact, investment, and family strain served as predictors (after controlling for the same demographic and relationship variables included in the main analyses). Based on the results, we cannot rule out the possibility that the direction of causation might be opposite to the direction presumed in our main analyses. Satisfaction with contact, investment, and family strain accounted for 11% and 22% of the variance in severity and worries, respectively, incremental to the variation accounted for by the control variables (both values significant at p < .05). In contrast, satisfaction, investment, and strain accounted for just 4% of additional variance in scores on the impact index, a value that approached but did not meet the p < .05 criterion. More research is needed to determine which if either of the two causal orderings examined here is most appropriate for understanding the relations among these variables.